Computer Science News

Continued research success

Dr Nathan Griffiths has been awarded a new EPSRC grant titled “JASPR: ￼Justified Assessments of Service Provider Reputation”, which is to run jointly with KCL. JASPR aims to improve the way that services are discovered, selected and used by providing rich, personalised reputation assessments of services with the rationale behind those assessments. It is particularly targeted at giving small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) better exposure to large clients by reducing clients' reliance on extensive market histories or opaque online reviews that do not account for personalised needs.

Dr Ranko Lazic and Dr Marcin Jurdzinski have been awarded a research grant from the EPSRC for the next 2.5 years, entitled 'Counter Automata: Verification and Synthesis'. They will collaborate with Prof. James Worrell and Prof. Joel Ouaknine of the University of Oxford, to develop new automated procedures for analysing counter automata that will ultimately aid the design, modelling, verification, and analysis of complex computer systems. Commenting on the project, Dr Christoph Wintersteiger from Microsoft Research Ltd wrote that it 'has potential to significantly influence the next generation of Satisfiability Modulo Theories solvers [...] that in leading software industry today, are at the core of many advanced program analysis, testing and model-based development tools'.

EPSRC have recently funded a Warwick/York/Imperial £1M CCP Flagship project on "A radiation-hydrodynamics code for the UK laser-plasma community”. This project aims to provide large-scale software development for internationally leading computational science in laser plasma physics. This comes on the back of the new Centre for Computational Plasma Physics established by Prof Arber (Physics) and Prof Jarvis (Computer Science). This EPSRC project will fund a postdoc in the High Performance Computing Group for three years.

The Department of Computer Science is proud to have received the Athena SWAN Bronze Award, valid until November 2017. The Athena SWAN Charter is recognising commitment to advancing women's careers in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEMM) employment in higher education and research.

The Athena SWAN Charter is owned by Equality Challenge Unit. It is funded by ECU, the Department of Health, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Royal Society, the Biochemical Society, the Scottish Funding Council and the Higher Education Authority Ireland www.athenaswan.org.uk

This latest award, makes Warwick one of the few universities where all STEMM departments have Athena SWAN awards.

The 2014 QS Worldwide university rankings have been released today and Warwick Computer Science continues to be ranked amongst the best.

North American universities dominate the Top 10 Computer Science departments, but 11 UK universities feature in the world’s Top 100 departments, including Warwick. Warwick Computer Science scores particularly highly in the categories 'Employer Reputation' and also 'Citations per Academic Paper’.

The CDT (Centre for Doctoral Training) in Urban Science has started! 10 incoming PhD students and 4 academic staff travelled to New York last week to take part in the CUSP-based City Challenge week. Students had talks from industry and city partners, and got to work in mixed institution/nationality groups on example case studies in urban informatics.

CUSP is an applied science research institute dedicated to researching and creating new solutions for the pressing and complex challenges confronting the world’s growing cities. CUSP is a significant component of New York’s Applied Sciences NYC Initiative. This research institute will spark new technologies, discoveries and innovations, will create new businesses and jobs, and will educate the workforce for the high-tech urban science sector. New research and technologies developed at CUSP are expected to generate $5.5 billion in economic activity and create a total of 7,700 jobs over the next 30 years.

The Wolfson Research Merit Award is one of the most prestigious UK awards, supported by the Royal Society, the UK's national academy of science. The scheme provides up to 5 years’ funding after which the award holder continues with a permanent post at the host university. Jointly funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the scheme aims to provide universities with additional support to enable them to attract science talent from overseas and retain respected UK scientists of outstanding achievement and potential. Professor Graham Cormode's research will focus on "Small summaries for big data".

The Wolfson Foundation is a grant-making charity established in 1955. Funding is given to support excellence and the focus of the award is a salary enhancement.

The Royal Society is a self-governing Fellowship of many of the world’s most distinguished scientists drawn from all areas of science, engineering, and medicine. The Society’s fundamental purpose, reflected in its founding Charters of the 1660s, is to recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.

Lei Shi receives Best Student Paper Award at ICWL'14

In a row of successes, Lei Shi receives again an award, this time at the ICWL'14 conference in Talinn, Estonia, where he secures the Best Student Paper Award, for the paper 'Multifaceted Open Social Learner Modeling'.

Congratulations again, Lei!

Tue 26 August 2014, 12:44

Mike Joy, Meurig Beynon and Steve Russ will lead an Erasmus+ project, Construit!

Congratulations to Mike Joy, Meurig Beynon and Steve Russ, who will lead an Erasmus+ project, to start in October 2014, for 3 years! The project also involves EDUMOTIVA from Greece, UEF from Finland, Helix5 from the Netherlands, Comenius University from Slovakia, and University of Edinburgh UK.